The Ugly Thugs Running Vietnam Aren’t Experimenting With Democracy

It may look like a capitalist frontier, but it’s a police state at heart.

BY THOMAS A. BASS-JANUARY 22, 2016

Vietnam is a moiré pattern: Squint at the country one way and you get an aspirational society zooming into the future. Squint another way, and you get an old-fashioned jailer of anyone who refuses to toe the party line. The sunshine lobby focuses on Vietnam’s lovely beaches, food, and allure as a tourist destination. Human rights reporters focus on patterns of abuse.

Yes, the country is opening to the West and rapidly developing.And yet — for all its sunny charms –Vietnam is a culture in ruins. The censors have silenced or exiled the country’s best artists. Vietnam’s best novelist and poets no longer write, except for those who circulate their work in underground samizdats. Journalism is a corrupt enterprise controlled by the government. Ditto for publishing. History is too dangerous to study. Freedom of religion, thought, speech — the ministers of propaganda curtail them all.

From Jan. 20 to 28, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) is holding its 12th quinquennial pig roast known as the National Congress. Some 1,500 party members will gather in Hanoi to adopt a five-year economic plan and approve a recommended slate of candidates for the CPV’s Central Committee, its elite 16-member Politburo, and the party’s general secretary (the chap who sits at the head of the table). Corrupt from top to bottom, bloated by patronage and devoted to crony socialism and rent-seeking, the CPV maintains a hammerlock on Vietnam’s government, military, media, and 93 million people.

“Marxism needs a dictator,” Russian refugee and author Vladimir Nabokov said, “and a dictator needs a secret police, and that is the end of the world.”

International observers study CPV congresses for signs that one faction or another is coming to the fore. In the next few weeks, expect to read articles about Western sympathizers vanquishing Chinese partisans, or vice versa. This narcissism of small differences misses the point. The CPV’s roughly 4.5 million members want their vig. “It’s like watching people fight under a rug,” said Vietnamese poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh about the closed meetings that produce Vietnam’s rulers.

Yes, the CPV has evolved since unifying the country after the Vietnam War in 1975. Facing starvation in the countryside, the sixth party congress in 1986 abandoned a Soviet-style command economy in favor of market socialism. The CPV allowed free markets to flourish at the bottom of society andencouraged “red capitalists” to emerge in the middle, while they reserved for themselves shipbuilding, banking, mining, and other state-owned enterprises at the top of society.

Along with these economic reforms came a brief period of cultural reform. Vietnam’s gray net of state surveillance was lifted long enough for the country’s four great postwar authors to publish their best-known work: short-story writer Nguyen Huy Thiep (“The General Retires”) and novelists Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), Duong Thu Huong (Novel Without a Name), and Pham Thi Hoai (The Crystal Messenger). But the gray net was already being tucked back into place by 1991, when the culture police raided Thiep’s house and destroyed his manuscripts. Since then, Thiep and Bao Ninh have lived in internal exile, publishing censored stories rewritten by party hacks. After spending eight months in prison in 1991, Huong now lives in Paris, and Hoai lives in exile in Berlin.
                                                           

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